


The Ankou

by if420fireflies



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, Draco plays magic the gathering, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Light Angst, M/M, also Monopoly, and Harry serves Death, no beta we die like men, very Pratchett-inspired grim reaper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26315500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/if420fireflies/pseuds/if420fireflies
Summary: Draco doesn't want to die, Harry just wants to do his job and kill him, and the situation is an annoyance for all parties involved. In alternate wording: servants of Death are not supposed to go around falling in love with the harvest.Featuring a Harry Potter in black robes and a scythe, a Draco Malfoy who dies just as he was beginning to work out this whole 'being a good person' thing, several years of repressed pining, and several time-consuming Muggle games.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 10
Kudos: 60





	The Ankou

**Author's Note:**

> I've always loved how warm and yet still unknowable Terry Pratchett's portrayal of Death and the afterlife is, so I stole and adapted some concepts. Many concepts. But rest assured, you don't need to have read Pratchett to read this! On the other hand, if you ever have an afternoon to spare, I definitely recommend trying Pratchett's Discworld series.
> 
> A quick, fluffy and slightly angsty reaper!Harry/dead!Draco. Thank you in advance for reading!

A small silver-and-crystal hourglass, engraved with the words _Draco Lucius Malfoy_ in sloping cursive. Fifteen more minutes. Harry huffs impatiently, leaning against the brick of the Manor’s back walls, his scythe digging into his shoulder blades. He squints up at the afternoon sun, and inspects the vibrant gardens around him lazily. Somewhere, blackbirds chirp. Eleven more minutes. A spider drops onto his nose. Harry shakes it off carefully.

Seven minutes. He wonders how Draco will be spending these last few moments of his life. In the distance, he can see the figure of Narcissa Malfoy kneeling, tending to her flowers gracefully. Well, he might as well go and find out what Malfoy’s up to. It’s almost time anyways. He stamps his foot against the ground, hard, and the world fades into grayscale. He walks through the walls, drifts upwards through a ceiling, then a corridor, until he finds Malfoy sitting against a desk, brewing some sort of potion. He’s currently crushing aconite flowers. Wolfsbane?

When Harry was alive, he probably would have felt some sort of emotion, watching Malfoy sitting here in a mansion after the crimes he and his family had committed. But death puts things into perspective, as does the scythe on Harry’s back. And especially, as does the rapidly dwindling sand in the lifetimer with Draco’s name on it. Harry examines it. Five more minutes. 

Draco adds the minced aconite to the potion a tiny spoonful at a time, and seems to be holding his breath. When he adds the last spoon and the potion begins to emit blue smoke, he exhales with relief. He mumbles a Stasis charm, then pours the contents of the cauldron into fourteen separate vials, bundles the vials into two small cardboard boxes, and scribbles shipping addresses onto the boxes. Two minutes left. He washes his hands in a nearby sink, and wanders into the next room. Harry follows him, in the spectre world. One more minute. Draco reaches for an untouched piece of cake on the mantelpiece, takes a bite, and is dead within sixty seconds. He was twenty-five years old.

Harry takes out his scythe.

Draco’s spirit stands up, spots Harry, and immediately starts talking, but his body remains prone on the floor.

“ _Potter?_ Why are you on _my_ property? Aren’t you dead? It was all over the Prophet. _Savior of the Known Universe Dies in a Muggle Car Crash._ I mean it in a very literal sense when I say I could _not_ stop laughing.”

Of course, why does it matter that Harry literally can no longer experience emotion, not in any human sense of the word? Or that they’re both dead? Draco’s ability to annoy Harry is clearly just a universal constant.

“Malfoy, yes, I died five years ago. Consider what it means that you can see me right now.”

Harry can’t help feeling satisfied when Draco looks down at his own corpse and turns, well, deathly pale. Suddenly, Draco looks desperately business-like.

“Poisoned?” he asks.

“Seems so. Must have been something extremely fast-acting in the cake. Now, if you’ll excuse me-” Harry raises his scythe.

“Why do you have a scythe,” Draco says, very quickly, the words frantically evacuating from a burning building.

“Lost a bet when I died. Now I have to assist Death for, oh, the next millennium,” Harry says cheerfully. It’s always amusing when he runs into someone he knows. “Okay, I really need to cut your lifeline now.

“Potter, no, please, don’t-”

He should’ve known Malfoy would be one of those people who tried to resist cosmic forces. Merlin knew he had always been stubborn. Then again, who was Harry to talk, when he had challenged Death for his own life?

“Look, Malfoy, you had your time,” Harry holds out the empty lifetimer helpfully, “now it’s time to go.”

“You must have challenged Death to a game, yes? In exchange for not dying yet. And you lost, so now you’re this.” Draco gestured to Harry’s black robes and scythe.

“Yep.”

The affirmation is barely out of Harry’s mouth when Draco says frantically, “okay I challenge you.” The words create a glowing blue line in the air between Harry and Draco, connecting them by their right wrists, and Harry sighs. Cosmic rules were exhausting.

“My terms are that if you win, you may return to your body. If I win, you die. What contest form do you prefer,” he asks as obliged by the insistent blue glow, feeling extremely irritated.

“Best of three for Monopoly, Magic: The Gathering and, uh, Jenga,” replies Draco instantly.

“Malfoy, that’s not an actual challenge.”

“Yes, it is, Muggles do it all the time,” Malfoy says, looking smug.

“They do not!”

“How would you know? You’ve been dead for years, and before that you were practically a hermit.”

Harry hesitates, trying to reply. Not like they give you a handbook on what to do when your dead childhood nemesis challenges you to fake Muggle contests. The blue bond tightens pointedly around his wrist.

“I accept,” Harry growls reluctantly, and the line relaxes. Malfoy smiles happily at him, and Harry is suddenly struck by how wonderful it is to have someone, still somewhat human, smiling at him. Even if it has to be former Death-Eater Draco Malfoy, who is _apparently_ now a connoisseur of Muggle culture. 

Harry snaps his fingers, and a Monopoly board appears in the distance, floating in mid-air, along with two white plastic chairs. The background of the spectral Manor fades from view, leading only uniform greyness. 

“Come on, then,” he says. “We don’t have all day.”

\--oOo--

“Pay up, Potter,” Malfoy crows, as Harry stares in disbelief at Draco’s monstrous collection of houses and hotels on Euston Road, then reluctantly forks over the money. Malfoy counts through it self-importantly, then holds his hand out.

“You’re missing seven pounds.” 

“Ugh!” Harry scrapes together the sum in one-pound notes, and smacks them into Malfoy’s outstretched hand.

“Thank you very much,” Malfoy says, and smiles irresistibly sweet at Harry. Harry smiles back, but quickly realizes what he’s doing, and wipes it off his face. Draco stares at him.

“What?” Harry says, as he regains his impassivity.

Malfoy glances away, charcoal eyes shying quickly, and rolls the dice.

Harry wonders if he knows that each roll brings him closer to his fate. The dice come up, one and three.

Despite the massive toll Euston Road took on him, Harry makes a speedy recovery, and Malfoy is soon approaching bankruptcy. He surveys the board with dismay.

“When did you collect that set? I swear I had one of those.”

Harry shrugs, and rifles through his stack of 100-pound notes. “It’s your turn,” he says.  
Malfoy moves his top hat, gliding it along the squares of the board. 

“So, what’s it like being a servant of the Grim Reaper?”

“Pretty fucked, honestly.”

Malfoy snorts. “But you have some of his powers.”

“I and the others sort of imprint off of Him. I met Him once, outside of the challenge. He told me it takes the edge off.”

“Hm. Scythe comes free?”

“Nah, had to craft it myself, out of a can of tuna and three crying children,” Harry says with a perfectly straight face.

Malfoy smiles at him again. God, Harry doesn’t want him to stop doing that. But this time, he checks himself and makes sure that he doesn’t smile back, instead accepting Draco’s rent payment with good grace.

They stay like that for a long time, the bits of paper flowing back and forth between them, backdropped by oblivion.

Eventually, Harry breaks the silence. “So, why are you so desperate to go back? Most people are naturally built to adapt to death quickly.”

Malfoy doesn’t reply for a long time, instead counting his money to see if he can buy anything.

“Why did _you_ challenge Death?” he asks instead of answering.

Harry watches him. He’s still looking down at the board. His hair must be getting in his eyes, Harry thinks. It shines silvery in the dim lighting of nowhere.

“I’d already cheated Death once. It felt wrong not to at least try to do it again,” Harry replies.

“Same reason as you, then. I have obligations. And bad habits.”

“Oh, what obligations could a post-war Death Eater have?” Harry asks.

To Harry’s surprise, Draco's eyes fill with sudden fury. 

“That _is_ the issue, isn’t it, _Potter,_ ” he hisses. The Monopoly money flutters in his shaking grip. “A post-war _Death Eater._ Your _turn,_ ” and he flicks the dice painfully hard against Harry’s fingers. “I'm trying to be better, I’m not just going to die the way I _was._ ”

Harry tosses the dice from hand to hand, hesitates, then rolls. Double sixes.

“You can change after death, though.”

“You certainly have.”

Harry chances a glance at him. Malfoy quickly looks up, and adopts his familiar pureblood sneer.

“You were brewing Wolfsbane? For Greyback victims, I suppose?”

Malfoy shrugs, and holds his hand out for the dice. “I get a second turn,” says Harry. Draco snatches his hand away like he’s been burned. Harry rolls again. Six and five.

“So who do you think poisoned you?”

“There are plenty of people who prefer me dead, Potter. Among them, evidently, is you.”

“No. Just doing my job. I don’t care,” and the three-word lie slips out easily from between Harry's lips.

“Then yes, the wolfsbane was for Lavender Brown and some others. Ministry wolfsbane is always poorly brewed.” After some time, Draco continues. “I wanted to make up for... well, something, at least.” Harry sneaks another glance at him, and despite himself, admires the determination in the set of his jaw, the fierce desire for change in his eyes. They fall back into silence. Draco lands on Mayfair, and goes bankrupt. 

He looks at his feeble collection of money and mortgaged properties, expression guarded, his silvery hair falling over his grey eyes. He’s horribly silent. 

“Well, then, next game,” Harry says brightly. “Magic: The Gathering, you said?” Draco suddenly grabs at Harry’s sleeve, desperately, as if it’s all that’s keeping him from certain death. Well, he’s not wrong. But Harry looks at him, and realizes he’s breathing heavily and blinking so quickly Harry can barely see his eyes.

“O... kay. Want to go for a walk first?”

Draco does not respond.

Harry taps his foot against the ground, and Death’s gardens come into view. They’ve been meticulously planted by someone who learned what colour from a book and clearly not really understood what it was. The flowerbeds are full of blooming pale ivory lilies and passionfruit flowers so purple they’re black. There are tall spires of strange bulbous blooms, in all the shades of darkness. Albino lavender sways gently in the breeze, next to trellises of very, very dark red roses. Trees with black leaves and black trunks reach like concrete telephone poles to the sky. A path, paved with tar, winds through the flowers. Harry takes Draco’s arm, and drags him along, neither of their footsteps sticking in the tar. They walk past a pond, full of splashing skeletal trout.

“You only ever rolled double sixes or a six and a five, Potter.”

“Yeah. Death’s powers, and all that. _'In the end, Fortune smiles upon no one but the Reaper,'_ that kind of thing.”

“I’m going to lose to you, and then die,” Draco says.

“Yes.”

“You won’t do anything about it?”

“No, I don’t think I can.”

“Okay. Let’s play the next game here, then.”

Harry snaps his fingers in reply, and two decks of cards and a playing mat appear. Draco spreads the mat out with long fingers, and settles himself grimly on the grass. 

“What deck is this?”

“There are multiple decks?”

“For the love of Merlin, Potter,” he says, as if Harry is supposed to know all the intricacies of some geeky Muggle game. He looks through his cards, makes a noise at the back of his throat, and then shuffles them. Harry pulls his own set to himself hesitantly, and draws his hand, feeling rather out of his depth.

“Have you played before?” Draco inquires.

“I’ve been to tournaments after I died, but no, I haven’t played.”

Draco grins at him again, a toothy thing, and this time, Harry smiles back without restraint.

A few minutes later, Draco seems to be enjoying his metaphorical chess game with Death. “No, Potter, that’s a _fetchland_ , you can’t just tap it for mana. Read the description.” Harry looks at the card description obediently. 

“Oh, what, I have to look through this whole stack of cards for _another_ land? What was even the point?” 

“The point _is,_ now you have _choice._ Go on.”

Harry shuffles through his library, then looks back at Draco desperately. 

“ _Help._ ”

“Please, Potter, consider my situation, and then tell me why I would help you.”

“ _Help me!_ ”

Draco sighs dramatically, and then picks a Basic Island for Harry, his fingers brushing against Harry’s. Harry swallows.

“There you are, you’re playing blue-white control, so you get the _blue_ land. Blue, Potter!”

“Control?” he asks.

“You play stupid counterspells to stop me from doing what I want. Come to think of it, that’s very fitting. You’ve been doing that your whole life.”

“What deck are you playing?”

“It’s called Death’s Shadow.”

“Ah.” Harry tactfully leaves it at that.

“The general strategy is for me to lose a lot of life.”

“Ah.”

“It’s also funny that the deck you happened to summon, knowing almost nothing about the game, is extremely good against mine.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you done your turn?”

Harry looks at the elegant, soft lines of Draco’s face, then down at his singular land. “I can cast this Opt card, right?”

“Yes.”

Harry drops his cards on the grass trying to play Opt, but it’s worth it to hear the sounds of Draco laughing at him, warm and soft.

During the next few turns, Draco rips his hand apart, while patiently explaining basic game mechanics to him.

“So… you played that while my card was on the ‘stack’?”

“Yes, Potter.”

“Uh. Okay. I have no cards left. I’m losing, aren’t I.”

“Mhm.”

Draco plays his Death’s Shadow. It comes in at 7/7, and Harry has no cards in hand, and one creature in play.

“Okay, I don’t want to do this anymore,” Harry says.

“You concede?”

“Yes, please.”

Draco _really_ smiles at Harry, then. Harry stares at his mouth, curled upwards in the ferocious joy of victory, of trying to exist, live, improve. Harry’s forgotten what that was like. He thinks about a tiny potions spoon, diligently ferrying aconite into a cauldron, about Draco, washing his hands clean, about “yes, Potter, things that are played earlier sometimes execute later, what’s so hard to understand about that.” He thinks about former Death Eaters playing Magic: The Gathering and about a handshake, offered to him when he was eleven. 

Harry’s also almost forgotten what it was to want someone. But he feels it now, curled up like a purring cat under his ribs, the hunger for pewter eyes, silver hair and a former Slytherin's unflinching determination. It’s the thrill of the reaper man as he watches the corn strive ever higher. But it’s also the melancholic warmth of watching a loved one try so unthinkingly, inconsolably _hard_. He extends a hand to Draco, who gives it a blank stare.

“I think this has been left on the ‘stack’ for some time?”

“God. Potter. You’re a fucking sap.”

But he shakes Harry’s hand anyways. 

“You know, I’ve been in love with you since third year,” Draco says.

“Oh. You sure had a weird way of showing it, then.” Harry is aware of the fact that if he was human, his heart would be beating frantically at this point.

“That was another thing I wanted to change.”

Harry bites back his own admission of love. Standing here, waiting for his Death powers to help him win the stupid contest, listening to Draco’s painfully unfulfillable aspirations, this is ridiculous. He snaps his fingers, and a perfect three-by-three stack of Jenga pieces appears. Draco’s face falls. But then Harry takes a careless swipe at the tower, and the whole thing collapses. Best out of three.

“Oops, how clumsy of me,” he says. The line between their wrists recognizes Harry's second loss, flares, then dissolves. Draco’s eyes go wide. Harry takes out Draco’s lifetimer, the top bulb empty and still.

“You still want this?” he asks.

“Y-yes? Yes, I do,” he finishes with more confidence. Harry begins to tilt the hourglass.

“Wait!” Draco calls.

Harry looks at him patiently. Draco shifts his weight hesitantly, bites his lip, then throws himself at Harry. Tilts his head up, wraps his arms around Harry's shoulders. He kisses Harry briefly, ephemerally, like the tick of a second or the length of a lifetime or a galaxy exploding for thousands of years, and for a second, for a lifetime, for thousands of years, Harry feels anger and sadness and guilt and gratitude and sheer, overpowering, wonderful joy, joy for silvery eyes and silvery hair and the desire to grow.

“Thanks,” Draco says, and gratefulness shines in his face.

“No problem,” Harry replies, “I’ll see you soon.” And he overturns the hourglass.

\--oOo--

Minutes after, or maybe days, time is always confusing in these places, He showed up and stood next to Harry, watching the skeletal fish swimming in the pond.

YOU HAVE GIVEN HIM ONLY ANOTHER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, said Death, in a voice like coffin lids falling shut.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” says Harry, kicking a rock nervously.

IT IS ALRIGHT. ALTHOUGH I WILL BE HANDLING HIS NEXT DEATH MYSELF.

“Of course, I’m aware that my actions-”

Death turned a piercing gaze towards Harry, which was impressive for an anthropomorphic personification with no eyes.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO LEAVE MY SERVICE AT THAT POINT, IT WOULD, Death struggled uncharacteristically for a moment, ALSO BE ALRIGHT.

“Thank you,” Harry says, startled.

GOODBYE FOR NOW, HARRY POTTER.

“Goodbye, sir.”

\--oOo--

For two decades and five years, Harry cuts lifelines, consoles lost souls, helps the dead across asphodel fields, and is challenged to play chess a few times. He wins, of course. The years feel like, well, years, grains of sand slipping through an hourglass. Sometimes, he runs into Draco in the field, stopping to collect the soul of one of Draco’s colleagues. Draco works as an Auror, then as a Curse-Breaker, and finally, he sets up a potion shop, brewing rare but essential drafts. People are thankful, thankful to Draco Malfoy. He makes friends, hesitantly at first, seemingly sure they’ll suddenly shout ‘Death Eater scum!’ and hex him, but they don’t. There’s Luna Lovegood, and Colin Creevey, and a Hufflepuff named Claude, and to Harry’s surprise, Ginny Weasley.

Sometimes, on days when Harry isn’t busy, he visits the Manor and watches Draco brewing wolfsbane, still ferrying aconite slowly, spoonful by spoonful, into the cauldron. And sometimes, Draco startles, looks directly into the empty air where Harry is, and smiles hesitantly. And Harry smiles back. 

So Harry cuts lifelines, consoles lost souls, helps the dead across asphodel fields, and is challenged to chess.  
Until one day, Death calls him, and he sees Malfoy’s soul standing there, outlined in a passageway of light, and he bows deeply to his former master, cuts through his own lifeline with his scythe, and goes gladly.

“Did you get what you wanted?” he asks Draco.

“Yes. Did you?”

“Well, now I have.”

“I- Alright, you just ruined a perfectly good cinematographic moment. Just by being a sap.”

“Draco, nobody is even _watching_ us. You clearly haven’t changed all the ways you said you would, because you still show it in a really weird fucking way.”

“Oh, fuck you, Harry. _And_ I had a perfectly good life. ...thank you for that.”

“I said, it’s alright.”

“Thank you for waiting, then.”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“Good grief Potter, we’re dead now, stop feeding your own Savior complex and let me thank you for something!”

“I’m actually not the one with the complex here. Are you even listening to yourself, obsessively trying to thank people?”

“I love you.”

“Nice try, but saying that will not magic away the fact that you clearly have a complex, Draco.”

Death watches them walk into the light, hand in hand, still bickering, acting for all the world as if two games and a purposefully toppled stack of Jenga blocks were enough to make you fall in love, wait for twenty-five years for another person, say those three words so easily. And maybe they are enough. 

OR PERHAPS, THEY WERE ALREADY CLOSE DURING SCHOOL, Death muses. He picks up Harry’s scythe, abandoned on the floor. 

SHODDY WORKMANSHIP, Death thinks critically. NOT NEARLY ENOUGH CRYING CHILDREN.

He taps the scythe, and it turns back into a tin of cat food. He carefully peels the lid off, and places it on the floor.

Death turns away, his own scythe over his shoulder.

A few moments later, a cat stalks by, licks half-heartedly at the canned fish, and continues on. As all things eventually do, one way or another.

**Author's Note:**

> The Ankou is a omen of death, and in some legends is said to have been forced to serve Death after challenging Death to a hunting contest and losing. In other stories, the Ankou is the last person to die in a parish each year, who then collects all the souls for the following year.  
> I apologize for any mistakes in any of the game rules.  
> Kudos, comments, and edit suggestions are greatly appreciated!


End file.
